Slashdot Mirror

Errr... no.

Phone - https://xkcd.com/1802/

The fact that we aren't talking about time or energy requirements that are on the order of lifetimes of stars or the mass energy of a star should tell you that it broken.

This is probably the best layman explanation of cryptographic security I have ever seen. If the numbers involved in breaking something crypto related can be expressed in easily understandable terms without doing something like this: https://what-if.xkcd.com/96/

Then the crypto thing you are talking about is broken and shouldn't be used.

Personally, I think the phenomenon is closer to https://xkcd.com/902/ myself.

Does it also search through a database of software patents to make sure that it doesn't infringe?

Right now it's using this database, presumably they have a licensing contract with Randall Monroe that gives them permission to use the code.

https://xkcd.com/1185/

OT but I believe that XKCD has reached the level where it is the embodiment of the old joke where the prisoners (or whoever) sit around telling jokes by reciting the joke's index number. Sometimes you don't even have to look at the XKCD cartoon, you just look at the number in the link and go "yep, that's applicable". (Although in this case I had to look).

GP here.

I thought long trying to find a fitting XKCD as a comeback but failed. Resorting to the archive I managed to squeeze out this one: https://xkcd.com/307/

Another one I think you have to look up. (I'm sure there are better ones though).

https://xkcd.com/1185/

OT but I believe that XKCD has reached the level where it is the embodiment of the old joke where the prisoners (or whoever) sit around telling jokes by reciting the joke's index number. Sometimes you don't even have to look at the XKCD cartoon, you just look at the number in the link and go "yep, that's applicable". (Although in this case I had to look).

GP here.

I thought long trying to find a fitting XKCD as a comeback but failed. Resorting to the archive I managed to squeeze out this one: https://xkcd.com/307/

Another one I think you have to look up. (I'm sure there are better ones though).

https://xkcd.com/1185/

OT but I believe that XKCD has reached the level where it is the embodiment of the old joke where the prisoners (or whoever) sit around telling jokes by reciting the joke's index number. Sometimes you don't even have to look at the XKCD cartoon, you just look at the number in the link and go "yep, that's applicable". (Although in this case I had to look).

GP here.

I thought long trying to find a fitting XKCD as a comeback but failed. Resorting to the archive I managed to squeeze out this one: https://xkcd.com/307/

Another one I think you have to look up. (I'm sure there are better ones though).

https://xkcd.com/1185/

OT but I believe that XKCD has reached the level where it is the embodiment of the old joke where the prisoners (or whoever) sit around telling jokes by reciting the joke's index number. Sometimes you don't even have to look at the XKCD cartoon, you just look at the number in the link and go "yep, that's applicable". (Although in this case I had to look).

https://xkcd.com/1185/

So long as people are willing to lie and manipulate to get laid...

So long as people are people, it wont work... Right.

So instead of adapting the technology to the people, people should be adapting to the system. I bet you're thinking that in a few iterations people will change to fit the system.

I take it you're a CS student.

Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1253/

I would rather see naming rights auctioned off to the highest bidder, with the proceeds to benefit space research. Let the human ego do some good.

Or what about Sneezy, Phylum, Europe, Sloth, Guacamole, Data Link, Colossus of Rhodes? https://www.xkcd.com/1417/

Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1253/

https://xkcd.com/927/

No, C-x M-c M-butterfly

Maybe he just, I dunno, likes it?

https://xkcd.com/1782/

Like Werner Von Braun?

Obligatory XKCD

https://xkcd.com/1095/

https://xkcd.com/221/
http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-...

re-introduction of nuclear power, in the form of redesigned, safer fission reactors, is also something we need to embrace, rather than succumbing to the 'nuclear boogieman' of the past.

You talk about human nature wanting personal vehicles and then take exactly the opposite argument here. Human nature doesn't change just because its convenient for your argument. People are afraid of nuclear fission whether or not those fears are justified. That is human nature and it is unlikely to change. And their fears are not without some rational basis in many cases. The problem with fission as a power source is simply that when it goes wrong it can go REALLY wrong. Given that humans are imperfect sooner or later you are going to have a major catastrophe if we rely on nuclear fission. We've already had two good sized disaster and they are unlikely to be the last. There has been no breakthrough that eliminates the problems and risks associated with it. Are modern reactors safer? Probably. Does it matter? Not really. Should we use more fission? Perhaps but it probably won't happen.

I think fossil fuels are a clear and present danger to us as a species but thinking that we are just going to switch over to fission to replace fossil fuels is mostly just wishful thinking. Nuclear fission simply has become to big of a boogey man and a political hot potato to be a realistic alternative any time soon.

"... to some speculation that the Earth may be losing its magnetic field -..."
Since the data ultimately suggests that fluctuations are completely normal, I submit that this also starts to explain why people are taking scientists less and less seriously.

Don't blame this on the researchers; blame this on the "science writers" (including the author of the summary here on Slashdot). The actual study - at least the abstract and the supplemental material, which was all I could read without a PNAS subscription - says no such thing and that particular wording is just a click-bait addition in order to garner more views. Science journalism - like so much journalism this day - has gone on a real decline over the past twenty years and tries to "spice up" every study rather than simply reporting the science. The end result is that scientists end up sounding inconsistent and hyperbolic ("Coffee Cures cancer!", no wait, "Coffee Causes Cancer"), when they usually are neither; it is the people reporting on their work that are to blame.

Also see for a more graphic comment on the same problem.

Amen.
https://xkcd.com/435/

TFA reads like a classic example of "User refuses to learn to use screwdriver, complains all fasteners are hard to use."

* Author seems to think encryption is a simple magic bullet.
* Author doesn't even bother reading the manual for the tool.
* Author reviews only one tool in a large family of tools, blames the entire family of tools for his own ignorance and incompetence.
* Author doesn't know about the problem space, has expectations that reveal a tragic level of misunderstanding.

The bottom line is encryption is easy.... authenticity is not.

Without authenticity, encryption isn't terribly useful.

Authentication isn't a problem that's been remotely solved. If you have a better idea than the following two, you're going to make a fortune:

- A web of trust requires real effort on the part of the user to work - you have to attend a few keysigning parties for it to work. Even then, can you really trust a web of trust?
- A trusted third party model assumes a third party is actually trustworthy -- which experience has shown isn't really the case.

It's Deep Blue, and that was in 1997, under 20 years ago. AI that can beat experts in Go (a much harder task) was achieved just late last year.

And I'm sorry, but if you haven't noticed how much better neural nets have gotten in the past 10 years, or even the past five, or even the past two, you haven't been paying attention. The last company I worked for used them to dissect brain scans, and that was 5 years ago. Now they're embedded into things like image searching, text translation tools, voice recognition, etc. Seriously, haven't you noticed how dramatically these things have gotten better over the past decade, or have you forgotten about how terrible they used to be? You tell Google Photos to search for pictures of a beer on your phone, and it will actually find pictures of beer you've taken. Remember this comic, treating image recognition as an AI Hard problem? That was just from 2 1/2 years ago. It was already becoming obsolete then. This sort of image recognition task is the stuff we grew up being told that only humans can do; now computers are getting as good at it as humans. The best face recognition apps are now as good in random controlled trials as humans.

That doesn't mean that we're going to have "conscious AI" tomorrow. Consciousness isn't just training to a task. But we keep shrinking the bounds of what makes us unique as humans. I'm certainly not willing to bet that there will never be some point where we cross that line altogether.

The classic double-slit experiment says otherwise; if you pass one electron at a time through the apparatus, and you get an interference pattern, that means the electron passed through both slits (i.e. it was in two places at once), and interfered with itself.

That's bovine fecal matter. You do not detect an interference pattern. An interference pattern would be the envelope of a very large number of detection events. You would only have one detection event. xkcd hails your extrapolation skillz

Next, your understanding of the Young experiment is lacking. It might have helped if you did this in a Physics lab. Or wrote the wave equations, to realize the factors that drive the interference pattern's shape. You might otherwise be surprised to find out that if you pass one electron through the double-slit system you observe one electron behind it. The magical uncertainty thing is the transversal position, that you cannot pre-calculate ahead of observing it. It's a probabilistic thing.

And last, it's getting really tiresome to see people who likely never studied Quantum Mechanics with any degree of rigor repeatedly make this one mistake. Stop trying to assume that macroscopic approximations such as particles apply at the quantum level! It's like trying to apply flat-space Newtonian mechanics to a General Relativity problem and then complaining that the GPS that someone put together using your equations is completely inaccurate. Wrong tool for the job. Here's a hint: all we observe at the quantum level are interactions - those have many 'particle-like' features; what happens in between interactions, a.k.a. propagation, is not particle-like and instead to our macroscopic-trained minds looks like wave propagation. You might have heard of it, some people call this conundrum particle-wave duality. An electron is such a beast, interacts sort of like a macroscopic particle, propagates sort of like a macroscopic wave. Stop trying to force it to be a macroscopic animal, it is not.

Now, if you understand that, you'll stop trying to invoke double-slit experiments, as there's no need. If you want to bring up the wave-like propagation of electrons, a single slit is enough, you get a diffraction pattern out of it. Same thing with light, really, so no need to bring up electrons at all.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Renewable energy sources made up nearly nine-tenths of new power added to Europe's electricity grids last year, in a sign of the continent's rapid shift away from fossil fuels.

Obligatory XKCD.

https://xkcd.com/743/

https://xkcd.com/927/

How was this not the first post? And just so we don't ruin a perfectly good law...NAZIS

Here, it seems designed right for this!

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/927/

Seriously though, is anyone else getting tired of these smaller and smaller fragile connectors that have about a one or two year lifespan before they become loose and wobbly and malfunction?

First requirement of a connector is it should reliably stay connected even with little pulls on the cable,
Second requirement is a decent lifespan, and non-self-destructive tendencies through normal use.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Obligatory XKCD

Water absorbs radiation pretty effectively

Indeed.

Just imagine Clint Eastwood as system manager.

Just did.

https://xkcd.com/979/

Always leave a good answer if you can. Just because you will never get credit, doesn't mean others years from now wont appreciate it.

You should read "GOTO considered harmful" before you bash it.

"Most programmers have heard the adage "Never use goto statements", but few of today's computer science students have the benefit of the historical context in which Dijkstra made his declaration against them. Modern programming dogma has embraced the myth that the goto statement is evil, but it is enlightening to read the original tract and realize that this dogmatic belief entirely misses the point."
http://david.tribble.com/text/...

In the bad old days, all you had was goto, and every program looked like spaghetti. Now that we have if...then...else, loops, switch-case statements,
goto should only be used as a last resort (and every use should be justified). I've been a professional programmer for twenty years; last year I used goto *twice*.

And never forget https://xkcd.com/292/

What does a "normal global average" mean? What is normal and what is natural variation?

The "years before present" in one of those is years before about 2000.
I thought xkcd put it well. It's not just the temperature but the rate of change of temperature which is unnatural.

electric vehicles really might be cost competetive with pure ICE in 20 or 30 or 40 years

Let's see what happens to the price of oil in 20, 30 or 40 years.

See how natural the end of this graph is:
https://xkcd.com/1732/

Longer timescales:
https://xkcd.com/1732/

In pictures you might understand:
https://xkcd.com/1732/

"Brain zapping" headband devices have been worn by the Microsoft Windows 10 development team since day one.

Huh??? I thought that was due do Microsofts still ongoing attempts to hit the Ballmer Peak: https://xkcd.com/323/

https://xkcd.com/1765/

You might find this appropriate https://xkcd.com/937/

Dumbfuck needs a oblig link?

Here, dumbfuck: https://xkcd.com/958

Transcript because you can't be trusted to follow a link. I hope you fucking choke on it.

[Cueball is sitting at a desk with a laptop, looking at a review website]
        Cueball: What's with this negative review? You liked that hotel.
        Black Hat: I have a script that posts a bad review for every hotel I stay at. It reduces demand, which means more vacancies and lower prices next time.

        Cueball: What if the place sucks?
        Black Hat: I change the review to positive to steer other people over there.

        Cueball: You punish companies you like!
        Black Hat: The odds of my review putting a hotel out of business are negligible.
        Cueball: If we all did that the system would collapse!
        Black Hat: Doesn't affect my logic. Tragedy of the commons.

        Cueball: That's not even the tragedy of the commons anymore. That's the tragedy of you're a dick.
        Black Hat: If you're quick with a knife, you'll find that the invisible hand is made of delicious invisible meat.

https://xkcd.com/1367/

First, thanks for doing some math, any math. Seriously. We'd have better outcomes if people did. In full disclosure, my numbers are SWAG, it all varies hugely according to location.

Second, thing in 'Doing the Math" is to start with some realistic numbers. Let's start with the '50,000'. The New York State Hudson Valley ( let's stay relatively close to Pennsylvania ) has long been a high tech manufacturing center for decades, but even recently there have been fab facilities constructed and expanded - take glance through those facilities, and you can compare the employment counts of LCD plants around the world also. Maybe, on the outside, a thousand workers at this facility on a permanent basis. In the global supply chain, the facilities operate according to various compromises of scale according to the products and markets, across all the major firms, whether it's Samsung, Phillips, Sony, etc. The facilities are even purposely designed so that the production lines can be readily decommissioned and relocated - even for things as large as aircraft ( http://www.aerogo.com/industri... ), all you need is a extremely flat floor, which is why companies favorite subsidy is the roads, lot, buildings, education training etc. that they can't move. The vast number ( Zipf's law ) of the 1000 employees are Electrical and Electronic Equipment Assemblers or equivalent ( Note that the TOTAL number of these folks in the US Semiconductor and Other Electronic Component Manufacturing industry is 41180 ( allied, maybe triple that), which gives another triangulation on the 50,000 figure for one plant. For now, I am just using Fermi estimation ( explained in XKCD's https://what-if.xkcd.com/84/ ), and consider orders of magnitude. Definitely not 5, not 50, very highly automated 500, 5000 is a bit large, but certainly not 50,000. The wage is easier, mean Pennsylvania( 13,000 ) is about $35,640 annual.

Say the state or local government ( not certain how Penn allocates those responsibilities) has to pick up the tab for road construction in proximity to the plant ( Construct a new 2-lane undivided road – about $2 million to $3 million per mile in rural areas, about $3 million to $5 million in urban areas, ARBTA ). Then sewer, increased water supply, etc. It gets interesting when the government issues bonds to fund these for the companies, essentially a hidden form of taxation. Since there will be a howl from existing companies who will now be competing with Foxconn for the available labor pool, the state usually sets up a training program for those unemployed (10 instructors with burden), which alone would equal $600,000 - approx equal to the $600,000 from 5000 employees ( your calc mentioned 50,000 generating $6 Million ). ( BTW, 2015-16 Pennsylvania DOT's motor license fund total was budgeted at $4.37 billion, less PASP. $170 million around here doesn't even buy a mile of freeway, Fermi test on Wikipedia).

On my look, we are going to see a shift back to the US for simple reason that the China Sea is going to heat up considerably in the near future, and you may actually have 50,000 Foxconn Executives and higher management working as assemblers in Pennsylvania while they draw on their Swiss bank accounts. :-)

HELP WANTED: Parking lot attendant, fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese, MS in EE ... nobody local, guess we'll need some visas ...